Now, after a far larger economic meltdown, it looks increasingly likely that no big name will be criminally prosecuted. This month, according to theLos Angeles Times, the Justice Department decided not to charge Angelo Mozilo, the former CEO of the former company known as Countrywide Financial Corp., someone long thought of as a prime potential target.

Should Americans be outraged that the meltdown moguls aren't headed for the slammer, as director Charles Ferguson suggested Sunday night when his documentary, Inside
Job, won an Academy Award? Perhaps. But, nearly three years after the financial crisis hit, a better way to look at the lack of high-level indictments is as an indictment of the entire financial system — a system that was rife with avarice, ignorance and double-dealing. How do prosecutors find the bad apples in a putrid landfill?

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Why not go after the subprime lending companies such as Countrywide, Ameriquest and New Century Financial? They're all gone. How about their top bosses? It's difficult to indict executives who stay above the fray and merely demand that their underlings deliver higher revenue and profits.

Arguably, the true enablers of the financial crisis were on Wall Street. Major banks bundled and resold toxic loans as safe investments on the grounds that credit agencies gave these packages triple-A ratings. No surprise there, as the agencies were paid by the banks to act as their propaganda agents. But proving bad judgment and conflicts of interest are easier than convincing a jury beyond a reasonable doubt.

Prosecutors know how hard it can be to win complex corporate fraud cases. In 2008, the Justice Department did bring a criminal case against two hedge fund managers at Bear Stearns, the defunct investment bank. Both were acquitted.

While a series of perp walks does not seem to be in the offing, we still feel compelled to offer a rogues gallery of sorts. These are the miscreants who wreaked havoc on a truly colossal scale and inflicted economic misery on millions of people around the world, even if they managed to stop short of indictable offenses:

•Mozilo. If anyone acted and looked the part of a villain, it was the co-founder of Countrywide. Defiant to the end, Mozilo told the Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission (FCIC) that Countrywide was "one of the greatest companies" in U.S. history. He was long the spokesman for the subprime industry, arguing — not without merit — that such lending had its place for a segment of society that couldn't qualify for traditional loans. But in the final years of the housing bubble, he loosened the company's already lax underwriting standards and pushed loans at virtually anyone who could be coaxed into signing. The financial crisis began when loans like those started to go bad.

•Roland Arnall. The late owner of the parent company of Ameriquest Mortgage led a kind of double life. He co-founded the Simon Wiesenthal Center and served as an ambassador in the administration of George W. Bush. But his company was arguably the most predatory of all lenders with its aggressive sales tactics emanating from boiler room call centers. He invented a product whose time should never have come: the "stated income" loan — also known as a no-doc, or liar's, loan — in which the applicant didn't have to document income. Even the payment of $325 million to settle a civil suit by attorneys general in 49 states and Washington, D.C., did not slow down Arnall's toxic lending machine.

•Brian Clarkson. The former managing director of credit rating agency Moody's Corp. found a novel way to quadruple his company's market share in rating mortgage-backed securities — he transferred, or fired, most of the analysts in the group. The replacements were noted for their willingness to employ new ratings methodologies, ones that didn't involve knowing or caring much about the products they were passing judgment on. In his FCIC testimony last year, Clarkson claimed to not remember many of the decisions he had made or what prompted them.

•Stanley O'Neal. Any one of dozens of executives at several Wall Street institutions could be singled out. But O'Neal, the former head of Merrill Lynch, might be more representative of the mixture of pathos and incompetence that motivated Wall Street. Having missed out on much of the easy (and illusory) money generated by the subprime trading and securitizing boom, he did with his top mortgage securities experts what Clarkson did with his analysts. O'Neal let them go— just in time for the storied company to jump headfirst into a business about to implode.

•Joseph Cassano. The former head of AIG's financial products used the sterling credit of his parent company to quickly become the world's largest insurer of the complex mortgage products Wall Street was churning out. Famous for his temper and his certainty in his own views, he fostered a culture in which few questions were asked. By the time employees began to dig a little into the mortgages they were on the hook for, it was too late. Cassano had bet the future of one of the largest companies on the planet without even realizing what he was doing. Needless to say, he lost the bet.

This list is far from comprehensive. Others, such as Richard Fuld, who ran Lehman Bros. into the ground, deserve dishonorable mention.

Why hasn't the financial crisis resulted in more criminal charges? It's possible that the Justice Department, focused on terrorism and short on financial-fraud experts, has dropped the ball in its investigations.

But a more likely explanation is that outright fraud was concentrated at the bottom of the food chain, with mortgage brokers who wrote up falsified loan applications. The big fish at the top were guilty mainly of greed, shortsightedness and mass delusion— which did far more damage.

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